A 57-year-old Florida man who had argued that lethal injection would cause “needless pain and suffering” because he has Parkinson’s disease was executed on Thursday evening after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute request to halt the proceeding.
The decision was unsigned and did not include the court’s reasoning, which is typical in such emergency cases. There were no public dissents noted.
The case of the man, Loran Cole, has drawn particular attention because of the abuses he said he had suffered at a notorious reform school, which formed the basis for Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Nickel Boys.” Over the years, former students at the institution, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, have come forward to share accounts of brutality. Beatings were common at the school, and reports of rape and forced labor were rampant.
Mr. Cole, who was executed at Florida State Prison, had been convicted in the 1994 killing of a Florida State University student who was camping with his sister in a national forest.
In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, lawyers for Mr. Cole argued that his symptoms would “make it impossible” for his execution to be humanely carried out. “His involuntary body movements will affect the placement of the intravenous lines necessary to carry out an execution by lethal injection,” they wrote.
The Florida attorney general, Ashley Moody, in a brief to the justices, contended that Mr. Cole had waited too long to raise the issue of his Parkinson’s symptoms, only voicing concerns in recent weeks.
None of the case examples cited by Mr. Cole included other prisoners suffering from Parkinson’s, Ms. Moody added, noting that Florida uses restraints during lethal injection to limit a prisoner’s movement.
She called his claims that his Parkinson’s symptoms would make it difficult for executioners to inject the drugs “both speculative and legally insufficient.”
Even though it was not a focus of his emergency request, Mr. Cole referred to his time at the Dozier School for Boys in legal filings. His legal team described his “torturous treatment” there as a teenager, saying his punishment should be mitigated because of the abuses he had suffered.
Those conditions had contributed to his behavior, the lawyers added, pointing to a recent law enacted to compensate victims of the school as evidence that the state had taken responsibility for abuses at the school. Jurors might have decided against the death penalty for Mr. Cole had they known of his experiences at Dozier, they said.
